On 21st May 2003, a dozen OU staff plus a few external guests spent an afternoon being trained in the Compendium approach to visual problem analysis and meeting support. Compendium provides a suite of techniques and a hypertext software tool for managing different kinds of connections between ideas. The training was conducted by Simon Buckingham…
The annual World Wide Web conference held in Budapest last week lived up to its reputation for internationalism and foresight. Keynote speakers included Tim Berners-Lee on the semantic web and Pal Tamas on economics and the information society, a spread which reflects the diversity of the conference which encompasses both technical and societal aspects of…
Al Selvin, Senior Manager in the Information Technology Group at Verizon Communications, today presented a visiting speaker seminar on 'Practising Knowledge Art' at KMi's Podium. Creating and producing situated knowledge artifacts – for example, creating a model of a problem unique to a single group or organization – involves a range of roles and skills….
The AKT project is an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Its six-year, multi-million pound programme brings together internationally-recognised research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Sheffield and the Open University under the directorship of Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to develop and extend a range of technologies…
The CABER Online project was one of a number of schools’ broadband internet projects to be showcased at the BETT 2003 educational technology show at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre. The project’s funding body, the East of England Broadband Network (E2BN), is one of several regional broadband consortia whose responsibility it is to create the UK’s…
The seventh international conference on the internet and medicine, MEDNET was recently held in Amsterdam. As a largely technical forum, many of the papers lacked a clear evaluation component. As with the medical informatics literature there was a huge pre-occupation with quality and the kite-marking of quality. For me, the most interesting papers centred around…
Last week saw presentations from KMi projects dominate EKAW the premier European conference on the semantic web. One indicator of the lab’s impact can be derived from the number of accepted papers. Over a hundred papers from 20 countries were submitted to the conference. Of the 20 full papers accepted 6 were related either to…
This was the third year in which KMi have taken a Virtual Degree Ceremony to an international body of Open University students. From being the first calendared university ceremony of the new millenium, the event has now matured into a mainstream part of our degrees and ceremonies system. Students posted audio and text notes to…
UbiquitousD3E, a component of D3E, which generates a discussion site for any URL, has been distributed to OAI community around the world. The new release of “GNU EPrints 2.1” takes UbiquitousD3E as its add-on, which went public yesterday. In this release any published document can have two built-in buttons “goto public discussion about this document”…
Today the Open University New Technology for Student Services group visited KMi for a full day technology updating session. They spent the day exploring the potential for new technologies in the support of Open University students in the Centre for New Media’s “masterclass” area. In the morning session they exlpored applications of video – looking…
